Diane of the Green Van eBook

Silver-sweet through the quiet house came the careless
ripple of a flute, showering light and sensuous music.
There was a dare-devil lilt and sway to the flippant
strains and Aunt Agatha covered her face with her
hands.

“Oh, Diane,” she whispered, shuddering,
“when he plays like that he drinks and drinks
and drinks until morning.”

“Poor Aunt Agatha!” said the girl pityingly.
“What troublesome folk we Westfalls are!
And I no less than Carl.”

Aunt Agatha went to bed to listen tremblingly while
the dare-devil dance of the flute tripped ghostlike
through the corridors. And falling asleep with
the laughing demon of wind and melody cascading wildly
through the mad scene from Lucia, she dreamt that Carl
had captured an Esquimau with his flute and weaving
a suit of basket armor for him, had dispatched him
by aeroplane to lead Diane’s gypsy cart into
the Everglades of Florida, the home-state of Norman
Westfall until his ill-fated marriage.

CHAPTER V

THE PHANTOM THAT ROSE FROM THE BOTTLE

The demon of the flute laughed and fell silent.
The house grew very quiet. A fresh log built
its ragged shell of color within the library and Carl
drank again and again, watching the play of firelight
upon the amber liquor in his glass. It pleased
him idly to build up a philosophy of whiskey, an impudent,
fearless reverie of fact and fancy.

“So,” he finished carelessly, “every
bottle is a crystal temple to the great god Bacchus
and who may know what phantom lurks within, ready to
rise and grow from the fumes of its fragrant incense
into a nebulous wraith of gigantic proportions.
Many a bottle such as this has made history and destroyed
it. A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of
romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery
and irony and blood and death, whose temper no man
may know until he tests it through the alchemy of
his brain and soul!”

To Starrett it gave a heavy courtesy; to Payson a
mad buffoonery; to Wherry pathos; to Carl himself—­ah!—­there
was the rub! To Carl its message was as capricious
as the wind—­a moon-mad chameleon changing
its color with the fickle light. And in the bottle
to-night lay a fierce, unreasoning resentment against
Diane.

“Fool!” said Carl. “One mad,
eloquent lie of love and she would have softened.
Women are all like that. Tell me,” Carl
stared whimsically into his glass as if it were a
magic crystal of revelation, “why is it that
when I am scrupulously honest no one understands? .
. . Why that mad stir of love-hunger to-night
as Diane stood in the doorway? Why the swift
black flash of hatred now? Are love and hatred
then akin?”